Por la carretera ~ Manu Chao and his concierto clandesti in El Hospitalet

José-Manuel Thomas Arthur Chao is a French-born artists of Spanish origin. He began his successfull career in the mid-1980s with his first group, the Hot Pants, but it is with Mano Negra, a "multiracial" band founded in 1987, that Manu Chao reached popularity. 

"Mano Negra started playing in a subway in Paris before the band started to be known and selling records. We started in a subway for a living. This is what made the musicians of Mano Negra. And so the people using the subway in Paris was very eclectic. There was people from a lot of different countries, different cultures. So we have to be able to play all kind of music to please all the people in a subway. So that was a perfect school to learn a lot of different style of music."

In fact, Manu Chao and his band are influenced by many different music genres, such as punk, rock, French chanson, Iberoamerican salsa, ska, reggae and Algerian raï, that create a unique music style appreciated in all the world. His songs and lyrics deal with immigration, love, social problems and often carry a left-wing message. Moreover Manu Chao sings in many different languages, such as Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, English, Galician and Arabic, even mixing them in the same song.

His experience with Mano Negra ended in 1995, and Manu Chao started his solo career in Madrid with a new group, the Radio Bemba Sound System. In this new phase José-Manuel wrote some of his most famous songs, like Clandestino (1998) or Me Gustas Tu (2001). 

He considers himself a citizen of the world, however he actually lives in Barcelona (even if he rarely stays in Spain), a city that perfectly matches with his way of living, full of live and energy. The people love him, and he loves his city, he even opened a bar in Barri Gotic, the Mariatchi, and he owns a disco in El Hospitalet where he often performs.

This weekend, in particular, he held two conciertos clandesti in his disco, the Salamandra. Why clandestine concerts? In Barcelona he often performs in secret concerts to avoid a huge request of tickets (and resulting disappointements), so only if you're a regular client of his bar, or if you are a true fan of him (if you are really lucky too!), you will found out about his shows. 

Yesterday, 5th of May, Manu Chao performed for more than two hours without any true break, more than 20 songs in his set list, and energy, really a lot of energy in every single song. This is, in fact, why Manu Chao is so appreciated by his fans, even at the age of 53 he seems a young, crazy boy on the stage, always singing and inciting the public that follows him singing every word and dancing at every song. Clandestino, El Viento, Desaparecido, all his best known songs, spaced out by Pinocchio and other crazy motifs, entertained a public of less than 1000 people in a quite familiar atmosphere. A lot of good music, but also social engagement characterized this concert, with a speech about the human rights crisis in Mexico, with the disappearence of 43 mexican people in mysterious circumstances: 

¡Vivos los llevaron, vivos los queremos! 

With his music kaleidoscope, you will feel lighter, happier, so if you are fishing in troubled waters, if you have some problems, and if you feel sad, just go to one of his concerts, and you will forget everything for the next three hours.

Pase lo que pase, sea lo que sea, próxima estación: Esperanza.

Barcelona and the “Kosmopolis” Literature Festival (18-22 March)

This year I had the pleasure to assist the one of the most important festival concerning the contemporary literature, the name is “Kosmopolis. The Amplified Literature Festival”. It is a biennial literary event that takes place at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. The idea that prompted its creation was offer a place to meet art and literature, inspired by the awareness that we are citizens of the cosmos, citizens of the world.

Why Amplified? It is “amplified” because it takes into consideration all the manifestations of literature: spoken, written, printed and digital. It wants to encourage the “contamination” between disciplines and interaction among writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, actors, architects, designers and other figures on the culture scene. Such a way of presenting literature goes beyond the division between genres and accepts the evolution of the literature itself.

• The Program:

-          Dialogues and conferences: various Spanish and international writers have held dialogues on different topic concerning literature, such as the role of the contemporary narrator, what is making literature today, and which topic should it covers.

-          Journalism 21: A series of conferences about new styles of journalism, such as data journalism, investigative journalism and participatory one. New technologies make chronicles and personal stories a challenge for journalism; the conferences try to explain how to how to cope with it.

-          Alice turns 150: Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland goes beyond the bounds of children’s literature till to inspired artists, writers, linguists, philosophers, scientists and psychoanalysts. A series of conferences where held to explore its influence in the artistic world, to discuss about its versions and variations in the audiovisual world and about the interest it has excited in semiotics and linguistics, and its appeal for the field of quantum physics.

-          Alpha Channel: It was a programme of documentaries, shorts films, animations, videos and visual experiments inspired by literature. It explored the relationship between literature and the audiovisual. Every evening there was a film, while the whole Sunday was devoted to TV series inspired by genres with an literary origin: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Poe, Carroll, Conan Doyle, Conrad, Borges, Hammett, Ballard

-          Wrinting Labs: Learning to write means learning to read and learning to think, but it also it is important to know the techniques, strategies and tools. For these reasons a series of workshop were proposed in order to discover the ingredients, the medicines or the poisons present in the creation of a work.

-          Traslating Europe: It meant building permanent bridges to develop a cultural project that goes beyond borders. It implied also discovering works and authors, understanding how a language is adopted and cultivating diversity.

It is in the “Translating Europe” that the Italian singer Vinicio Capossela decided to present his book: “Tefteri. El libro de las cuentas pendientes (Minúscula, 2014). 

The book starts with the idea of crisis “a concept related to rebetiko, a form of music that recalls the idea of separation or division, an idea that is related to Greece, from which Europe is trying to get separated”. Capossela was in the streets of Greece in the year of the financial crash. He made a musical and emotional journey around the taverns of Athens, Salonika and Crete where the Greeks were rediscovering rebetiko, the music that recall the powerful link between East and West, and touches themes like pain, absence and fury.

In Greece means what  is tango or the Argentineans, what is blues for Americans and what is Fado for Portuguese. It was born between XIX and XX Century, in the slums of Greek cities from outcast people which wanted to tell their sufferings and pain through music. Nowadays rebetiko has been rediscovered by normal people and sang in the streets of Greece in economic crisis.

The singer and writer was accompanied by the editor Valeria Bergalli and the Greek guitarist Dimitris Mistakidis. Caposssela has talked about his book and what Greece as meant to him. He explained how the country is still the source of universal questions and how now is bringing us face to face with what is happening to normal people in such an European crisis.

Here a rebetiko song singed by Capossela:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW1IaEMeQ7A